6 Social Search Tools You Should Know About

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The World Wide Web is like a huge ocean filled with various currents, tides and hidden reefs where your company’s reputation sails along pushed by the winds of opinion. You can influence that opinion somewhat by blogs, articles, trade shows, your web site, radio shows, endorsements and countless other ways to get your message out to the public eye & ear, but how can you really know what effect you are having at a grass roots level?

Enter these 6 wonderful Social Search Tools. These little wonders will be the savior of small to medium sized business marketing professionals as they pick through search results, take the pulse of the marketplace and allow you to adjust your market focus to protect the reputation of yourself, your product, or your company.

All of these tools are effective at scouring the Social Networks for information – but not all display the results in the same way or take the same approach to how it should be managed. Some make a few decisions for you, while others just display raw information and let you decide what to keep and what to throw away.

Here is a basic review of each tool to help you decide which may be best for your reputation management needs.

Delver

One Line Description: Delver uses information you feed it to build a profile of who you are – then provides search results based on the collective “wisdom” of your network.

As of this writing Delver is still in it’s Alpha development stage but it’s an interesting little critter. Basically you “hand feed” Delver information about yourself from your blog URL, your Linkedin profile, Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, YouTube, Hi5 etc. and it builds a profile of who you are, then returns relevant results based on “the collective wisdom of your social world”. Assuming your friends really do “know what’s best” this could be a very handy too for some who want to find relevant info quickly.

In the words of TechCrunch: “The objective behind Delver is to uncover and make accessible knowledge and information that is hidden in users’ social graphs—an area that Google’s Marissa Mayer has indicated to be an essential part of Google’s future search offerings.”

As Delver continues to grow it promises to fill an interesting niche for those who like to stay within specific social niches. and feed heavily on user generated content.

WhosTalkin’

One Line Description: A very new straight-up Social Media search engine that sorts the results by type and displays the latest and greatest buzz at the top of the list.

WhosTalkin only recently came out of Beta and is one of my personal favorites. It doesn’t make decisions for me, it simply searches 60 of the Internet’s most popular social media gateways and finds what I want – I like that. Another thing I like is how it breaks the results into categories such as Blogs, News, Networks, Videos, Images and Forums. I can then browse through the posts to see what people are saying about me, my product or my client’s products in different areas of the Social world. A very handy tool for checking on reputation trends for small to medium sized businesses who may not be prepared to pay big time reputation management firms.

On the horizon it promises to allow subscribed members the luxury of “saved searches”, RSS feeds and (wait for it Bloggers) a WordPress plugin! Yummm.

SocialMention

One Line Description: Another straight-up Social Media search engine with the advantage of displaying the latest and greatest buzz at the top of the list.

SocialMention pulls it’s results from numerous sources including Google blog search, Twitter, Delicious, FriendFeed, Flickr, Digg, YouTube etc. and remixes these as a single stream of information. The default sort is by most recent first but you can adjust the list to view by Source.

SocialMention assigns a Social Rank to the term you search and lists the actual sources it found them in. I searched the term “dog training” and according to this search engine it had a mention every 31 minutes in the social networks and a Social Rank of 93/100.

SamePoint

One Line Description: Almost the same as WhosTalkin it searches the Social Networks and displays the most recent buzz first, allowing you the option to sort by source.

Like the other Social SE’s, SamePoint pulls from all the major Social Media sources and categorizes them into it’s own categories: Social Mentions, Discussion Points, Bookmarks, Wikis, Networks, B2B Networks, Groups, Life Casting, MicroBlogs, Reviews, Podcasts, Documents, Video, Images, News and Web. All you have to do is click on one of the links across the top of the page to have it display it’s findings under each category.

At the base of the Home Page is a “Trends” link, which leads you to a list of the latest Social Search Trends. The page says “updated very often” but no specifics on how often that actually is. Still it gives you an idea what the hot topics are for the day or hour allowing you to keep on top of what is happening in the Social world.

SamePoint has a search plugin for your browser toolbar and you can follow their development progress on Twitter

Serph

One Line Description: A clean and simple social search engine that digs for the very latest buzz and lists it for your review.

What I like about Serph is you’re not digging through last weeks or last months listings; you are looking at what was listed today in the Social Networks. If what you want is the most current information, Serph seems to have it’s finger on the pulse. Not that the others aren’t up to date. But Pulse doesn’t seem to care about what happened yesterday so the search results return quickly and one might hope Serph’s focus would be on keeping their content very current so for those whose job requires up to the minute information, this may be the tool for you.

On the right side of the search results page you’ll see “RECOMMENDATIONS” and a little blurb “Your search lead us to these possible queries.” with clickable keywords complimentary to your search string. A helpful little extra. They also have a search plugin for Firefox.

I can see myself using Serph on a regular basis.

OneRiot

One Line Description: A social search engine that prioritizes information according to what is currently popular within their community.

If you want to know what’s popping hot on the web OneRiot has the temperature gauge to tell you. It tracks what people are talking about and returns search results based on what is hot in the Social Networks right this minute. In their own words, they find the “pulse” of the web and rate search results as emerging, surging or raging.

The home page has a running list of “Today’s Hot Topics”. OneRiot offers RSS feeds, has a toolbar plug-in and you can log in using Facebook

No doubt one of these tools has most if not all the things you may need to track you or your business’ reputation. Get out there and start influencing the winds of change.